Racial Classifications in the US
Essay #4 Within the racial classification that exists in America there are a variety of differences amongst African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans. Each racial group has certain degrees of entitlement that differ from each other and are controversial. Legislation allows some groups more benefits over others. In the United States being black has been seen as a person having any known African black ancestry down their line. The main rule that determined this was called the one-drop rule (or as anthropologists called it a hypo-descent rule) where “one drop of black blood makes you black”. Although one may look white and have grown up with the majority of white ancestors, because of this rule, mixed children are assigned to the black community. The one-drop rule came about due to the need to obtain a white supremacy by keeping the color line incapable of little change as well as having that there would be a continuous source of slaves. Native Americans have dealt with similar struggles in the ways they are classified mainly being that there is no truly agreed upon definition which states what exactly an Indian tribe is. This being as each tribe defines itself differently from one another as well as how the U.S government has changed and operated around their land conflicting with their culture over time. Before Columbus arrived in 1992, there were no known Americans at the time that were seen as Indians or Native Americans. Each originally founded community had its own name that related to the people in that tribe as well as the land they lived in. Now that tribes were seen into these other categories of racial identification Indians themselves had to meet certain basic criteria which varied from tribal nation to tribal nation regarding things such as their linguistics, ceremonial and cultural knowledge. Blood quantum, as Wilkins defines as the idea of counting the percentage of racial heritage, was first used in Indian context. It was a way